What's happening people, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Bjorn, lomborg is an environmental economist Copenhagen consensus Center. President public speaker and an author over the past, two decades. The media has made some alarming predictions about the imminent, end of the world due to global warming. But is this the priority that Global efforts should be focused on fixing? Does it have real world benefits or are there better ways to improve human lives, expect to learn why Greta Van Berg had to delete a tweet from Harvard.
Decade ago. The reason why climate change is a favorite fear tactic in the media, the most cost-effective ways to make the world a better place. Why sending kids to school doesn't necessarily mean they are educated. Why cold weather is much more deadly than heat just how inefficient it is. To save lives through carbon reduction, how dangerous Net Zero is as a policy and much more
Bjorn is very interesting fascinating guy incredibly well researched. Super empathetic, very reasonable. I loved this episode is everything that I enjoy learning about up, turning existing ideas and presumptions around what we should be focused on genuine practical easily applied solutions that can give us something better and a ton of stats and data and great stories to back it up. You're going to love this one. Don't forget, the might be listening, but not subscribed and that is over 50%.
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But now, ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Bjorn lomborg.
Five years ago, rhetta Thornburg tweeted climate change will wipe out all of humanity in five years now. She's deleted it. What's going on?
What so great a tunberg is doing what I think. Most rational people should really be doing. She's listening to what the media is telling us, and they're telling us. Climate change is not just a problem is not just dangerous. It's actually likely to wipe us all out and and so, you know, she's scared like many, many other people but of course, it isn't actually a problem that's going to end Humanity. Climate change is a problem, not the end of the world. If it's a problem, it's something that we should
To fix along with all the other problems in the world if it's the end of the world of course, that's the only thing we should be focused on. So I understand why there's such a focus on making us believe. This is really the end of the world. There's a new survey of the all the rich countries in the world. The OCD and said, 60% of all people, now believe that it's likely global warming will lead to the end of mankind, that's terrifying, because that's not what the UN climate panel is telling us. So problem. Yes, not the end of the
World and that's what Greta she tweeted this. It was it was a bad tweet in the first place because it didn't actually reflect what the author said, and it just, it felt right. I'm sure at the time. But of course, you can't actually get away with saying that and then, you know, realizing five years later, we're still here.
For the people who haven't been fully read pilled on the X risk definition, and why climate change doesn't meet that criteria. What's the 30,000 foot view of that?
I'm a little worried, I never remember whether it's the blue or the red pill. What is this? What is the red pill is
saying? Why is, why is climate change? Not a genuine existential risk.
So fundamentally if you see temperatures rise, or if you
Saw them drop that matter. Our societies will be ill prepared. So, you know, look at you live in Austin, right? And compare that to, you know, sort of Boston. They're both well adapted to where there are. But if it got very much warmer or very much colder, both would be ill adaptive, that's the main point. That if you change the temperature of the world, it'll be a problem for humans. And of course, I'll also be problem for all other living things. So there's a real problem here but the
That somehow a few degrees of temperature would then suddenly eradicate, everything is just simply way outside of what anyone the UN climate panel. Anyone else is really telling us there is a problem here. So the cost that, you know, you will have to have more air conditioning cost. Of course, you'll have less heating costs, most places and you know, many of those places it will sort of way out each other. But some places one will outweigh the other dramatically so it will be local problems and we'll,
Have some problems globally. There's a lot of researchers, including guy called William nordhaus. He's an economic professor at the University of jail in and New Haven, I believe. And he is the only climate Economist to get The Nobel Prize and climate economics and he asked tomates that. If we do nothing about climate for the rest of this Century, the impact will feel a little bit. Like we're four percent less well off than we otherwise would be. Now that's a problem.
Remember four percent is not the end of the world. And also, if you think about it, the UN estimates that by the end of the century, the average person in the world will be about four hundred and fifty percent as rich as he or she is today. So, we'll be much much richer but because of global warming will be slightly less much richer. So, instead of being four hundred fifty percent, as Rich will only be four hundred and thirty four percent is Rich. Yes, that's a problem. No it's not. The end of the world.
Why use the metric of rich?
Richness. Why is it that that's the outcome that's being optimized for here when it comes to
climate? Oh, look, look. And, and this is a common misunderstanding that somehow Economist and especially, you know, sort of welfare Economist only care about money. That's not what this is about. It's just a convenient way of measuring, a lot of different things. So it will be losses of wetlands and will be that some people will die. Some people won't die. It'll be a lot of other things. So we do this.
Only in many different ways. For instance, when we decide whether to put up a traffic circle or I believe it roundabouts and America. Or, you know, if we put up a highway protection and in the median or lots of other things, do, we hand out vaccines or make expensive operating procedures operation. Sorry, we decide on that from a societal point of view on saying, how much more good does it do in that will typically be in save lives.
Or if we're talking about nature and in preserve nature compared to how many resources we spend, economists tend to translate all of that into money because it's a convenient measure, but it's just one measure. It's a very important one, because that is what very often correlate, very, very well with pretty much anything else. We know that, you know, if you're, if you have higher incomes, you also might likely to survive more, you're likely to have more spare time, you'll likely to be better educated. You have lots of
Lots of other attributes that are similar in the sense of Desire below. You also have better environment typically so the point here is it's just one measure and many of getting a sense of what is the size of this.
When it comes to existential risk, the proper definition of existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse right of human civilization, it really does. It's been a pet irritant of mine ever since I started reading Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord
That people see climate changes in actual existential risk. When I say existential risk, permanent unrecoverable collapse, we are all paper clips, we are all gray goo, or we are basically permanently locked into being in the Stone Age and we can't get back out of it again. Almost all of the things that people focus their attention on stuff like climate change, nuclear war, even nuclear war. Every nuke goes off. Not an existential risk. Now, unaligned super-intelligent AGI, big exit.
Central risk, nanotechnology big existential risk. Engineered pandemics big essential risk.
I am blown away by the fact that of all of the Myriad of different X risks that we could be focused on climate change is the one that's galvanized. The most public attention and Toby's book, The precipice which is great says, it's got a 1 in 1000 or what? No, sorry 1 in 10,000 chance over the next hundred years of being the end of human civilization. Whereas I think AG is one in ten engineered pandemics a one-in-ten natural pandemics are one in.
30. Basically, it seems like all of the attention is focused on something which doesn't require it or deserve it. Why
welcome to the media age, right? This is this is fundamentally because climate change has all the great pictures. It also has some other things that are very desirable. Like for instance, you get to sell a lot of stuff. So, last year, we spent about one point one trillion dollars on climate policy, a lot of people are making money off of this. So obviously they're pushing this
When we had the big climate meeting in Denmark, in 2009, where we're going to save the world as they always have to do and those meetings bestest are big, wind turbine producer. I believe still the world's biggest wind turbine producer, they plastic everywhere in Copenhagen with say get a great agreement which yeah, I'm sure they're nice guys in actually want that but also it was a basic way of saying and make us lots and lots of money.
So so there's a lot of reasons why with climate, you can basically turn every weather story into a climate catastrophe, a potential climate catastrophe, it's great for for visuals. It's very, very hard to do that with grey goo or with artificial intelligence or even if you think about it back in 2019 virtually nobody took a pandemic seriously.
We knew it was going to happen. I mean, we're very lucky that
total Gates Wellness, Bill Gates will understand what 2014, my favorite famous for you.
And look, we saw it in, 1918, right? So it's not like it's a
surprisingly unprecedented
and, and yeah, we've seen this many times and and of course, asteroids, as an obvious point, we know that they can basically kill everything in the universe. So, so, I think one of the points that I try to do and I guess that's all
So white like me on the show is I tried as hell tell people, this is not about what looks best on TV or in this case, most scary on TV. It's about where we can actually do the most good for every dollar spent. Now, there's another thing and that's where economists tend to get really annoying as well as of course, to say some things, we can fix fairly cheaply. Some things are incredibly hard to do something about and and so again I would tend to say
let's focus on the places where we can make a huge impact at low-cost first before we try. And that's unfortunately, what climate is? We try to make a small impact and a long time from now, at an incredibly high cost which is not very effective.
Yes. So what you're trying to do is front-load some of the games that you can get because it's easy we have probably the technology at the moment. To be able to do it. There are some problems that you could foresee if you project out where technology is going that we may
More able to do it at a better price point in the future. So, okay, you've been doing this research, you've got this new, big, chunk of research that you spend an awfully long time doing, which is looking at the most cost-effective ways to make the world a better place.
What did that involve? What have you discovered? What was surprising.
So back in 2016, the world set targets for the world, they called the sustainable development goals that you may have heard of him. The u.s. assign up, Britain has signed up every country with
world is that was something where there's a hundred and hundred eighty of them. Are some
things I didn't 69 targets or goals. So we basically promised everything to everyone everywhere all the time.
And yeah, the guys who did this in New York, these World un ambassadors. Undoubtably felt really cool about being able to say, I promise is oh and I also promised us and I promise. Yeah. We basically just promised our own promise to you, promise to you but but you know that's not how the world works. And so not surprisingly we're actually failing on pretty much all of the promises now. They're all nice promises you know, so they are stop poverty. Stop hunger, stop climate change, stop corruption, stop War, stop.
You know, anything you don't like and do everything you do. Like, make sure everybody has good jobs and there's also some really odd ones in there. You know, we should recycle more and we should eat more Organics and we should have more parts accessible for, for handicapped people. And if it's not that these are not all good, although I would argue that some of them are perhaps slightly, different levels of attention. But what we try to do back then was to basically tell them, please some
Of these goals. Some of these targets, some of these promises are incredibly effective. You can spend a few dollars and do an amazing amount of good. Some of them are going to be incredibly expensive and really hard to do like yeah, stop War for instance. So maybe you should start focusing on the stuff that is really doable and effective first and no they didn't listen II met with a lot of them. They love this idea and they said, you know, this is all great. But the reality was you know, when you meet with Brazil's Ambassador I'm not pulling out Brazil for any good reason, right? But yeah.
We say, but fundamentally, I'm here to tell what Brazil's five points are and meet with no weejun Ambassador and he want it Norway's Four Points in there. And that's how we ended up with 169 targets. So we try to look across all these different areas and say, where can you do good? One of the things that everybody talks about is climate obviously, but the problem is, you can spend trillions of dollars and literally trillions of dollars and make no impact today, that's just how the climate system works.
Make a tiny change in 50 or 100 years now, that's not nothing. You know, if we have infinite resources, we should also do that, but it's funny that people worry. So, very little about the fact that many people live terrible lies right now, you know? So about half the world population live in low and Low Middle income country. So lesson, eleven dollars a day. And these guys could use a lot of things that in the rich world, we take for granted. So, you know, they died from easily.
Born Texas diseases. They don't have enough food, they have terrible education, they're all these problems there. So, what we try to basically say is, shouldn't we take a look across all these different areas that we're promising and say, if we can't do it all? What should we do first? So that was a very, very long way of saying this is why we've been doing this. So what we've tried to do is with lots of economists, say where can you spend a dollar or Yen, or rupee, or whatever your currency is and make the biggest
Bang and it turns out that some things are incredibly effective. Some things are not. Let me just tell you one. So we found 12 great things and obviously, you know, we've set a cut-off point in this is sort of what's called benefit-cost analysis. We look at what all the costs, not just the, the economic cost, but also social and environmental costs. And likewise we look at what all the benefits. So not just economic, but also social and environmental and then we try to say we're looking for
Really good ones. The one that deliver at least $15 of good for every dollar you spend. This is not investment advice so you can actually make your money back, right? You're doing good with your dollar but what we found for instance was education, so it's clearly a huge problem. So, around the world, we have spent the last what, 50 years, getting people educated getting them out of illiteracy and that's great. We got most kids into school today but unfortunately, there is a
What the academics. Call O, learning crisis, nobody's learning anything or very, very many don't learn anything. So they can technically read, but they can't understand a sentence. So let me just give you one example. So we asked people around the world that we I don't do this. A lot of really smart people do this. I'm I'm just aggregating all this stuff but they ask ten year, olds to read the sentence Vijay has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow shoes.
What color is the Hat? This is not super complicated or I mean, the right answer is red, but unfortunately, 80% of all kids in the developing world in the port low and lower middle income countries, can't answer this question. So they've learnt technically to spell their way through this, the sentence of. But they don't they can't string the words together and that's a terrible outcome because that means they're committed to Poverty. Even if we sort of get everything else, right, they still can't be.
Doctor. And so what we've tried to estimate is what would it take to make schools better. And there's a lot of knowledge about what doesn't and what does work. So, one of the things is you want to make better schools. How do you do that? Well, you give teachers better pay a lot of people argue that they did that in, for instance, Indonesia Indonesia doubled, teacher pay back in the around 2010 and because they did it in different.
Districts in different times, we can actually estimate the impact on this on kids, learning outcomes, turns out there was no learning outcome. The famous paper is called double for nothing. So fundamentally we spent twice as much Mike. It made the teachers much happier, not surprisingly, but it didn't have any measurable impact on the learning of kids. There's a lot of other studies that show what doesn't work, but here is the stuff that does work.
The real problem in schools is that you put all the 12 year olds together in one group, all the 13 year olds and other group, and so on. But these guys are vastly different in their outcomes. Some are really smart and know a lot of stuff on her, credibly board and some have no clue what's going on and everywhere in between, right? What is the teacher going to do? If you have like 30 or 60 kids in your class, your sort of teaching, to some middle ground? And most kids are either incredibly bored or totally lost.
But instead what you should do is teach at the right level, you should teach at their level. One way you can do that is by giving each of these kids a tablet. We're not actually going to give them a tablet because that's really expensive. They get to sit in front of a tablet, one hour, a day and then some other kids are going to be using for the other hours of the day. If you do that, then you have software that very quickly realize you know, they'll know that oh it's Chris, he's back and they'll know pretty much your level and then
We'll start teach you right from there. It turns out that that tablet. One hour day can teach you so much that by the end of the year, you'll have learned three times as much as what you normally would have done. You've learned three years of school in one year of schooling and you know, the cost is about $30 per kid, so that's four. You need to have solar panels to recharge. The, you need some lockers for the tablets because otherwise they're going to get stolen all that kind of stuff. But fundamentally, this is super cheap.
And could do an amazing amount of good. So there are some other Solutions in there. We try to estimate. What's the total cost of doing this for 90%. So there's almost half a billion kids in the low and Low Middle income countries each year. They need to get this education that's better. It's going to cost almost 10 billion dollars but you know what the benefit is and we again calculate that in dollars but the real benefit is that they will learn more, they'll go out and be productive when they're old old enough and they will help.
They built more wealth for themselves and for their societies but the benefit of those ten billion dollars is 600 billion dollars. We can make the world. 600 billion dollars richer that's 60 back on each. Dalek how amazing is that? That's the kind of points that we're trying to make. So I'm sorry I just you know, talk for way too long but I think in some ways this is the central point. This is not sexy but it's incredibly useful and those are the kinds of things that
We should be focused
on how close. Do you see this work that you're doing to the effective altruism movement?
So effective altran I love the those guys and there are a lot of fun to be with. It's very much, the same spirit so they are also very focused on saying what works, and what doesn't, there's two things. I think that sort of differentiate us, I think the main thing is that they tend to say the future
It is just as important as, as a present. This is one of the reasons why they worry about existential risk. They worry about the fact that what about, you know, us us, sort of running a running out of track and a million years is something. I think that's intellectually interesting, but it's just not how people react. Certainly, my not most people in the poor part of the world. But even in the rich part of the world, if you really thought, the future was just as important as a present,
All you would do was eat porridge every day and save all the rest to your descendants. We don't write, you know, the honest answer is, we actually spend most of the money on ourselves on our immediate surroundings. Then we spend some money on our descendants, we typically spend it through investment in infrastructure, and it'll learning. So that we're basically saying here is a little bit more of wealth. Here's a lot more of information. Now, go fend for yourself. That's pretty much how we
We actually do it and that makes for a very different sort of set up because the Alturas of the effective altruists. Although the you know they will say they care a lot about people. Right now they're sort of the way they think end up focusing a lot on the future. Likewise they also like to focus on animals for instance, where I got the I think they make some fascinating stories. I'm vegetarian because I don't want to kill animals. I love the fact that they focus on animals but again
Tend to see it as a professional Economist as a way of saying, it's about how much people value. These much of these animals not about the animals in and of themselves. And that's a very different sort of approach. So again, you know, I tend to probably say it's a little more important to to save humans.
I see the similarities with regards to what is the best way to get a return on the money that we put in? That was what sort of aligned it for me. And I also that's something that
I'm considered William mccaskill's been on the show. I found it very compelling. I think he's a really lovely dude. Big fan of Toby old big fan of Nick Bostrom and everybody coming out of that world but you are right in a perfect. Emetic Ali sealed sandbox. You might be able to say well look, we've got you know, fourteen point, five trillion future human lives. That will spread across the Galaxy. If we make these steps and get us there, but you need to account for, human irrationality. You need to account for human.
ACS like hyperbolic discounting and you know, self-serving bias and stuff like that. So you need to go, okay, I understand that that would be optimal but I need to factor in the fact that all of the people around us are going to spend most of the money on themselves. They're not going to leave everything to Future Generations. They are going to inherently be selfish even if they try to be selfless. So yeah,
I think, you know, if I could just, I would actually tend to go one step further because you're absolutely right. That's, that's how people act. But I think that also,
Also tells us about what is our actual preferences about this. So people will say, well, you know, if you ask them, do you care about the future and nobody's going to be annoying and say, no, fuck them or whatever. You're just going to say, I really want us to focus on the future, but then when you vote, when you spend your money, you're very clearly saying. Well, I care somewhat for the future but I actually care a lot for right now and for the next year and that kind of thing. And I think we need to reflect that and
And the second part is also, it makes it slightly more boring stories because it's fun to talk about us going out and colonizing the universe and all that stuff and it's slightly more boring talking about how do we make better education and developing countries for sixth graders. But this is what's actually going to fix a lot of the problems. And of course also what is going to get us to the Stars quicker if you will because yeah I think there's something slightly wrong about us thinking about going to the
Cars, while a lot of people are still starving and and more fundamentally. If we actually get the whole world together, there's also a much greater chance that people are going to be saying, we should also fix global warming. We should also fix lots of other things. Because now we're so rich that we can actually afford to care about the future.
So education is one of the longest levers that you found. What is another what you got? You managed to spend 10 billion and get 600 back not bad. What is another very long lever that you discovered?
So
There's so there's 12 all in all, another one is maternal and newborn Health one of those things that I didn't know anything about really. So every year 300,000 mom's died, in close to childbirth, from childbirth and about 2.3 million kids die each year in the first 28 days of their life here in, on the planet and most of these deaths absolutely avoidable. So you know, a lot of women
Used to die and rich countries. It was actually such that, you know, upper-class women died more because they went to hospitals and the 1800s and of course the doctor fresh from operating on somebody else came and helped her
with a leather interior. It's not a good
time. Yeah, bad idea. Bad idea. So so but you know, we fundamentally fix this in Rich world but every two minutes among die 99 kids died and we could do
Think about this. So the simple and these are really you know sort of almost strikingly simple things, is something the World Health Organization called be monk. This is one of the reason why these these sorts of solutions don't work, right? Then that's not fun, but it's basic obstetric and emergency maternal and newborn Health Care. See, I just screwed it up something along those lines. Anyway, so it's a, you know, it's a simple list of things that we should do. So it's, for instance, make sure that
You have clean operating environment, you're so like soap and disinfectant. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. But if you think about, you know, about a third of all these areas in the low and Low Middle income countries, they don't have clean water. They don't have clean sanitation. They often lack of disinfectants about a third of all the kids who died died from asphyxia so they basically don't get to breathe.
Again, I didn't know this but if you if you take even just, you know, European kits are rich country kids about 80% that come out of mom, they just start breathing right away about 15 percent of them need that shove in the and the backend to get them going, okay? And then they start gasping, right? But the last five percent actually need a mask and then you pump air into their lungs. And then they start breathing and they survive this little bag. It costs what $60 or something?
And it can save 25 kids over a period of two or three years movement. Why don't we have this? And there's part of the solution is our part of the reason is that this is not a high priority thing. You know, if you talk to politicians everywhere, politicians typically being old often also men, they'll want you know, cancer hospitals are stuff that they and their wives and others died from and and and maternal health is just far down the line. It's also
This little back that's not fun. If you're if you've ever seen, if you haven't you should the machine that says ping. Do you remember that one from the Monty Python? It's a Monty Python sketch where they're giving birth to their helping a woman give birth and but the doctors and the administrators only really focused on all the expensive machines they have an especially this one machine that says ping and that's really you know there's there's something missing. Oh the
Woman. Yes. Yeah, so so if you know doctors love and I totally get that right, they love you know, the exciting stuff and this mask thing is just not one of them. So what we're trying to say is you should invest in these cheap, simple things. It turns out that the total cost is about four point nine billion dollars, two billion of that is woman's time so that's actually not money that we need to come up with but it's of course till it cost because we need to get women into facilities.
To give birth instead of giving it back home because then they have that emergency option up opportunities in the hospital. But so, for about five billion dollars a year, we could make benefits that would basically say 1.4 Million Lives. It's a 266,000 women each year and say 1.2 million kids how amazing is that and the cost is so or the benefit is so great that each dollar will deliver $87 of
Social good. So you know those are the kinds of thing, they're slightly boring, they're not things, we you usually knew about but they are just incredibly effective, they're not climate change. But there is something in some sense much much better because they actually work right now. They'll help huge chunk of people either getting better off as an education or just simply surviving and they'll make live much better at very very low cost.
Let me do a little recap here, to make sure that I've got my brain in order. So the first person that I learned about why climate change is such a powerful existential risk, from is Mike Solana, the right pirate. Why is the sub stack? And what he said was that it was talking about demographic, collapse and he was saying that there's no smoke in the sky, there's no plumes, there's no hurricane. There's no forest fires, nothing, galvanizes, people to get after it. What it seems like you're saying here is, there are
Two, very boring, very unsexy very kind of behind the scenes. No press release solutions that we can spend money on, which will do the thing. That ostensibly a lot of climate activism, is trying to do. Presumably. The reason that people are doing climate activism is because they want to save human lives. People proselytize about the fact that they want to save human lives specifically in the most poverty stricken regions. You don't care about poor people. So on and so forth. But my time with a
Except sign taught me that a lot of the green policies that have been enacted hurt people from profit poverty significantly, more than they do developed countries. So, when you're doing this climate approach, when people are obsessed in climate as the highest, the longest, leave a point in order to affect people from poverty. They are applying a salve to everything which actually needs a slightly more targeted response. They are spending money in a way, which doesn't
Benefit and cause positive changes in the now it is an investment which takes a very long time to pay off, which may be better facilitated by technology advances in the future. There are more targeted solutions that we can do to people that are in these poverty-stricken areas. But because of the cultural, hold that climate alarmism and activism and green New Deal and 169 different targets has taken hold of. It's very difficult to pull any one person out of this because you have a
Like a cohesive group where if one person decided to retract you. So you don't care about the climate you don't care about. Poor people to go and actually know I'm doing a thing that cares more about poor people. It's more effective for people than what you're doing but it doesn't seem that way which means that they would then get lambasted, which is a disincentive for them to go and then do it.
And all of this together gets rolled into how do we spend money to achieve the goal? And presumably, the goal is human. Well being human flourishing, an acceptable standard of living for, as many people on planet Earth, something like that, right? Whilst factoring is
I would say, the goal is a better world and that could be a lot of different things that could be that you're better off materially. It could be that you don't die and it could be that you have a better environment and we try to balance all
Those it turns out that it's very much hot air. When you ask people in this, not very surprising, they care a lot more about not dying then they care about having having more wetlands and so much of the effect of stuff that we have is either getting people out of poverty or getting them out of death. So in this regard, the client, I loved her summary. And, and our off was, I was I wrong with what you do? No, I think that's, that's great. And one more thing, you know, when people say in this is,
Salut true, climate change will affect the poorest the most. That's absolutely true. But what you have to remember is everything bad affects poor people? Most. So they are most affected by infectious diseases or bad environments or any kind of hurricane weather
or expensive and in rural unreliable energy
access. Absolutely. And, and so, you know, the main point is, there's something slightly odd about the whole idea of a saying, you know,
What I see you. You're talk to her some person in the really poor and you say, I really care about you. I want to help you. I'm not going to drive to work tomorrow.
I know and I'm sorry, and that will actually mean that I won't emit CO2, which will mean in 100 years. Your descendants will be much warmer, but slightly less much warm. That's just that just seems almost careless of, you know, about these people. The real point is that you why wouldn't you want to help them now? And by making them better off, of course you will also make them more resilient to climate and to all these other things they're challenged with. So again it's an efficiency conversation of saying
Do you want to do a lot of good or do you just want to feel good? And you know, I hope that a lot of people actually want to do good but yes, you're absolutely right. It's really, really hard to have this conversation and and I think it's also important. Just take a little bit of a step away from from climate change. It's not just climate change, you know, it's also a lot of other things. You know, people care about a plastic straws in the ocean stuff, you know. I think that's great but again, you know, let's get a sense of proportion here. There's one other solution.
There is one point four million people that died from tuberculosis every year. Last year tuberculosis was again the world's leading infectious disease killer yeah covid disrupted that in 2020 and 2021. But yeah, this has been a huge killer. It's killed a billion people over the last 200 years. Every fourth person that you we didn't know, but in the 1800's had died died from tuberculosis.
And yet we fixed in the rich world and then we sort of think, oh, that's fixed everywhere. No, it's not and again because we fixed it. We know. Very, very well. How to fix this is about making sure that there's enough medication that people keep taking it. You have to take it for six months. So it's actually somewhat complicated. Most of us forget to take out pills after two weeks when we get better, and then you need to overcome some of the stigma and unique to make sure that people actually get found. The people who are sick, we
We there's about 11 million people who are sick every year, but we only identify about six million of them. And that's what keeps the infection going. Because there's a lot of people who don't get diagnosed and hence, either die or just pass on the tuberculosis. This again would cost in the order of five billion dollars a year but the benefits in terms of saving. So over the long run, we'd save about a million people and in the short run because you actually need to ramp
Quit serve about 600,000, people still pretty damn good, and imagine we could do that for every dollar spent would do forty six dollars worth of good. So, in the point that we're trying to keep saying is that there's these amazing things that we really make a huge difference. And that would also make people more concerned about all other things, you know, when, once you get out of poverty rules, actually start, caring about climate change. And, and, of course, as you point out also,
Reliable energy is incredibly important. It's one of the things that mean, that we are not affected by, you know, incredible heat waves or incredible cold waves, because we can cool and heat our homes and, and not surprisingly, most people, for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa want that as well, not primarily because of global warming but simply because it's really uncomfortable if it's very very warm or very, very cold and it's always been that way. Now, we've made it a little more uncomfortably warm and a little
Laughs uncomfortably cold in
Africa, overall, it's still a big problem and they would want most of the heating and cooling. Anyway, the point here is, if you get well off or if you at least get out of poverty, you're much more likely to actually have a good life and, you know, be able to afford the stuff. That'll make it possible for you and your kids to start learning and and, and doing better.
I saw a tweet from you. That said, cold kills, much more than heat each year. Heat kills half a million people but
Cold kills, 4.5 million people. How does that work? I was I was the nine times more deaths from cold than there is from heat.
So this is very well-established. There's this from a the world's first estimate of a truly Global estimate. We have very bad data from many places in the world. We have lots of great data for for rich countries but we only have mediocre data for a lot of poor place in the world. This was from the Lancet magazine. And so what we know is that
You
look across temperatures. If it's very cold, people die more. If it's very warm, people, die more. And so what they're basically looking at, is they say, where do you dial the least and it turns out that there's an optimal temperature, almost everyone on the planet, it shift soon. So in England, that's what 8 degrees and in India is perhaps why I don't know, 20-something degrees. Centigrade or now I'm totally lost in Fahrenheit but cold in England warming in India and the point is most of
The time we spend time below the optimal temperature, that is colder than the optimal temperature. That's why most people actually die from cold, especially in the cold week months of the year. People, especially old people will stay inside if they are if they're not really wealthy. And typically old people suffer more in this way, they can't afford to keep that home quite as heated as they like. And so what happens is when it's cold your body,
Sir the the blood vessels to keep your inner core heat but that drives up your blood pressure so we know everyone has higher blood pressure and and wintertime and that means you have a much higher chance of getting a stroke or blood clot or many other complications that sometimes lead to your death. And because this happens for literally almost everyone on the planet this is makes
For a lot of deaths, you know, it's not as it's like, smoking deaths. It's not something that you take asthma and then you die. But it's something of a statistical correlation. This is what all the people who've looked at heat and cold. Sa when it gets really hot, you die or you have a higher risk of dying. And when it gets cold, you have a higher risk of dying. Unfortunately, most of humanity, spend way more time being a little too cold. So the amazing thing is, if you look at India because they've done
Green tea as well. India, you'd imagine a lot of people die from heat. But actually again about seven times more people die from cold and this is because it's very easy to die and very easy to see when you die from heat. Because you died right after you die, you know, within the next 24 hours that's why heat waves are great TV but cold waves, you don't die the next day you die over the next 30 days because you've
Constricted your blood vessels, you've increased your risk of a heart attack and then maybe 15 days down the line. You get this heart attack but it doesn't show up on CNN. The problem here is again that we're Guided by what we see on TV rather than what the evidence actually tell us. Now, this doesn't mean global warming is not a problem because global warming will mean we'll have more heat waves and we'll have fewer cold waves in the short term. It actually turns out that
That's good for mankind overall because we'll see more heat waves. That would mean more dead but we'll see fewer cold waves and because many more people die from cold, now, actually be a net benefit for mankind, over the long run. Of course, eventually will run out of cold baths and so it may turn out to be a problem. The other part is it's much much easier to avoid heat death than it is. Cold death, because heat death, you really just need access to air conditioning for like 48 hours or so.
So we know you can open up the malls that kind of thing. There's a lot of ways that you can make sure people get more cooling free avoiding cold deaths you need heating on for months on end especially for poor people. And that's one of the reasons why not having access to enough energy is actually really, really harmful. There's wonderful study in the u.s. that looked at what happened. When you had fracking, the fracking Revolution, fracking Revolution meant that gas prices drop.
About half as much, that matters because the vast amount of people in the u.s. use gas for heating. And so they estimate it. What that mean? The gas became cheaper. Well, especially poor people kept their homes that are heated and that, of course, means they die less the net effect. This study estimate. Is that every year 11,000 people didn't die in. The u.s. from cold death. You saved. 11,000 deaths from cheaper gas. And so,
There's something weird about the way that we worry about. Oh my goodness. Are you know, the the heat Dome and 800 people died. That's absolutely something. We should be concerned about but we should have sort of a sense of proportion that, you know, fracking probably saved 11,000 people every year, every year about. So about 20,000 people die from heat in the US but 170,000 people die from coal. Why are we only talking about the heat? That's and not too cold as?
You've run a couple of numbers previously to do with education, to do with tuberculosis such at cetera. What is the return on money? When it gets spent on climate and green movement stuff?
So it depends on how you spend it if you. So the best analyzed data is for the EU, they had a twenty20 climate policy and that has been sort of look back at and we've analyzed in a lot of different ways.
and the simple answer and this is wrong, in the sense that there's so much uncertainty that is owned in order of magnitude estimate, is that every dollar spent
Avoided about three sets of climate damage that it could actually have been 30 cents back on the dollar. If we've been really, really lucky. It could also have been even less, but it was not a good deal, right? Instead of spending a dollar and during three cents of good, mostly poor countries in a long time. From now, you can just have given away the dollar and done, you know, 97 cents more good. Most climate policies are very close to one or below one.
So, they do very poorly and, and, and that's basically because politicians love to put a lot of restrictions on you. No, no, no, you can't solve climate change with new clip. However, it seems which would be somewhat cheaper or switch from coal to gas, which would often be a net positive for people. That's something that people would actually want to do as the u.s. dead in the 2010s instead. They say no, no, you have to put up solar panels or wind turbines which are often fairly
Fatso. So the estimate is the most climate policies is somewhere between ten cents, back on the dollar and maybe even a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half so you can do pretty good policy. But typically you don't, there is one policies that's incredibly good. So, we actually did a whole project just for climate together with 50 of the world's top climate Economist and three Nobel laureates to look at, where can you spend a dollar and do the most good just for climate? So, not talking about, well, you could do something about tuberculosis
Isis is something else. Just the climate it turned out that the best long-term policy was investment in green. Energy are indeed and this is not very surprising, really because imagine if you could come up with innovations, that would make green energy cheaper than fossil fuels, not the cheaper that we're saying right now that, you know, still needs a hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from the inflation production act or something. And the reason why China and India and everywhere else is only
taking up a little bit of this, but actually cheaper, which of course would mean that people would just jump on it. You wouldn't need any big Summits. People would just do it themselves because it was cheaper. If we had those kinds of breakthroughs, this could be fourth generation nuclear again. There's a lot of reasons why fourth generation might actually fail as at the end, but imagine if fourth generation was just
Vastly cheaper than anything else. China, India Africa, everybody would just buy it and if tons of it and the world would decarbonise, it wouldn't be the complete solution because there's lots of other ways that we need to decarbonize apart from electricity, but would be a big part of it. So the point is this is the solution that we've always used. If you think bad, there's there's a good story back in the 1850s, the world was basically running out of Wales.
We were hunting whales, almost to extinction because whales happen to have this wonderful whale blubber that burns really, really brightly. So most rich people and Western Europe and North America would keep their homes lit with this wonderful new whale blubber. It was much cleaner much nicer first much brighter, the solution to saving the whales. Wasn't to tell everyone, I'm sorry. Could you go back to the dirty old stuff that doesn't burn as well? Yeah. Yeah.
You couldn't convince people to do that, what you did convince him with was that we found oil. And so we found oil first in Pennsylvania and then everybody else everywhere else. And you could basically make the same clean burning oil product but without having to go out in the middle of the ocean and kill whales and just get a little bit of blower which was incredibly more inefficient. So fundamentally Innovation save the whales instead of telling people no you have to do without we came up with
Innovation that was better. We've done that in many other ways, you know, back in the 1970s, when everybody worried about there not being enough food to four people, the solution was not to tell every I'm sorry. Could everyone just eat a little less than will send it down to the poor people? The solution was the Green Revolution. Believe you know the guy who actually got the Nobel Prize for this and in 1970 Norman block. He was the leader of finding ways to make seeds more effective.
And so he basically made these new yield higher yield seeds, they would deliver two or three times as much rice or wheat or corn per acre or per hectare. And so you could basically give this to poor people and they could make more food themselves. This is what saved for instance, India. And many other countries is why India is gone from, you know, basically a basket case and the 70s to now being the world's leading rice exporter because we innovate it them. So
Not again about saying oh you know be a little more hungry than will save the world know. It's about technology and that's how we're going to save global warming. That's kind of how we're going to fix global warming by Innovation. If we can come up with technologies that are cheaper and less carbon-intensive, we've already done one, you know, fracking which basically made of very cheap gas which has meant that the u.s. is switched over from coal to gas. Gas, emits about half as much. That's a great climate so
There's no it's not the final climate solution because gas is still emitting CO2 and so we need to go further but you know surely that's one of the first things we should do to get. Sure they're Europe, that Africa, the India, and the China starts fracking, so that they can also switch away from coal and start using gas, instead, and become much cleaner and emit much less. So, again, the point here is simply to say there are smart ways to do this and they're dumb ways. And unfortunately, we seem to be insistent on saying, no, we're going to
The dumb stuff, which will be incredibly costly and actually not work.
It's strange to think that the biggest point of contribution that you can make as opposed to trying to wag your finger or get a Swedish girl to wag her finger and say you should change. This is something that you should do is just offer up a solution that people are naturally going to want to do because the incentives end up being aligned, what you're trying to do is force people through shame or guilt.
Or or sad imagery to do something that they fundamentally don't want to do. And you know, incentives will as incentives. Do basically, like people are going to end up aligning themselves, with what it is that they want you were talking there about the whales. I also saw a tweet from you, that said the polar bear population is increasing. Polar bears were intensely hunted but in 1976 the world band much hunting, the polar bear population recovered and now is at its highest in six decades.
Yeah, and and you know, again, this is just simply a question for saying this is not saying that overall climate change might actually be a problem in the long run for polar bears. I think the science is much less clear than what they want to tell us but there is undoubtedly a problem but that we are so focused on making climate change, the only problem and so we're somehow thinking. No, no, I want to help save polar bears. So I'm going to not drive my car tomorrow.
Just like the weirdest kind of connection that, you know, in a hundred years, maybe all I and everybody else in the US will save a quarter of a polar bear. Whereas you know, if you actually cared about polar bears we should stop shooting them. Now, the amazing thing is that every year so there's about 26,000 polar bears in the world right now and every year we shoot 700 polar bears
If you worried about polar bears, stop shooting polar bears has now. It's not rocket science. And so again, I simply try to point out what works and what doesn't I actually forgot to say just on the research and development for green energy. We also did a cost-benefit analysis in that and of course, it's very, very uncertain because you're basically making arguments about what's going to happen the far future. But what we estimate it was with world's best Minds was that every dollar spent will do $11.
Of social goods are essentially by investing. $1 on green energy R&D. You will help push forward the date. When green energy will be so cheap. That everybody will switch over which will then reduce climate damages in the long run about $11. That's a great investment is not as great as some of these other things I'm arguing for, but it's still a great one. It's by far, the best one we can do in climate.
Also, there are again as we said before, you need to account for
The fact that we have this desire to be seen as altruistic and empathetic and so on and so forth, need to account for the biases, everybody's got at the moment and one of them is we should be focusing on climate. So perhaps it's still within the realm of climate but it's the highest leverage point of doing. That might be a nice halfway house to get people to think a little bit more nuanced about this kind of a problem.
Yeah. And look I really appreciate
Those thoughts. We've tried for a very long time to get people to think about stuff that's fundamentally boring, but incredibly good and we tried all of these different things. So what we're trying right now is simply to say, we made all these promises, we're going to fail on pretty much all the promises. If we can't do it all, should we do the smarter stuff first? So we're simply saying 12 amazing things just to give you a sense of proportion. If you add up all of these
It'll cost about thirty five billion dollars. There's another six billion in Social costs that the moms waiting.com thing, but we need 35 billion dollars. 35 billion dollars is basically couch money right now for the world. This is almost nothing. You know, we spend what, three times as much on Cosmetics globally every year. So, yes, we could probably afford 35 billion dollars a year. The benefit,
Would be that we would avoid 4.2 million deaths each and every year, we'd save 4.2 Million Lives. And we've make the poor poor, half of the world. One point one trillion dollars better off every year. That's almost one dollar per person per day in the pour half of the world.
A you not just screaming at the wolves in your office every day with these figures in your hands and with you know these campaigns that everybody else is
putting out. You must just be losing. You must want to throw yourself off the roof. Like, why
why I clearly haven't?
Yeah, yeah. Well it's not know. Praise your sanity for sticking up with it?
I think yes, we have a saying at the think tank the Copenhagen consensus that, you know, we would love for everyone to be incredibly rational, but yeah, we'd loved it for everyone to do the right thing, but actually will settle for just people doing it slightly.
Strong and, and, you know, there's a lot of reasons why we don't get it right. And a lot of it is just simply where it gets hysterical creatures, right? I mean, fundamentally most so, David Hume back from 1700 who described, how we would sit and reading the paper and read about a big earthquake in China that killed hundreds of thousands people. And then he'd cut his thumb on the, on the paper and he'd be a lot more focused on and he's
no different from the rest of us could. Of course, that's how we, you know, we act, we just care a lot more about, you know, I just cut my thumb but it doesn't mean we're uncaring people. It just means we're, you know, sort of limited caring people. And so I just want to get our attention to at least saying, all right. Look, you're going to spend most of the money on yourself and you're going to spend someone really silly stuff and that's fine. That's how the world is. But when we're not, when we're actually saying, I want to do this because I want to do good in the world not as you
Get out sometimes when people set, talk about climate change and many other things when they talk about plastic storms and everything else, when we really want to do good in the world, then let's really do good in the world and not just end up feeling good about ourselves. And if I can push people a little bit to the smarter Solutions. Yeah, I would love us to do all 35 billion dollars but I'll settle for you know, Elon Musk saying, I'm going to do that one thing or whatever it takes. So you know we're throwing out these two
12, amazing, things, and hoping some of it will stick
how dumb of a policy is
NetZero.
It's an impossible policy while I look in the long run will probably get to NetZero. I struggle to believe that we won't be Net Zero and a couple centuries but but for 2050 or you know some of these states that are talking about it even before it's just absolutely Bonkers for two reasons, one of them is we don't have the technology for at least half of it and even if we had it would be fantastic.
Expensive, which of course is why most people talk about it. But most people don't actually want to do it. There was a wonderful story and political just today about Germany, where they say that most Germans would love to do all their climate goals, but they are somewhat skeptical about paying for all of that. And, you know, that's that's sort of the basic dilemma of most of these things that you talk about this stuff. But then if you actually realize how much it's going to cost, you can see that there's going to be
nobody saying, yes to the, there's one study of how much it cost it was from nature, how much it would cost for the average American to reduce his or her or the u.s. carbon emissions by 80% and the cost would be so, you know, pretty far from Net Zero by 2050 would be more than 5 thousand dollars per person per year. So you know, if you're a family of four, that's twenty thousand dollars for you every year and
If you want to go all the way or they couldn't actually get the model to do it all the way, it would cost more than twice as much so fundamentally this is just not going to happen in any realistic sense. Mackenzie did a study for what it's going to cost to go NetZero, they estimate it. Like many others have done, if we do really smartly which we won't do, but even if we did it would cost, you know, in the order of five to six trillion dollars a year, it would cost India about nine percent of its GDP. Every year, remember,
Were the total budget intake in India is about 12%, so they'd have to spend almost their entire Budget on Net Zero. Of course, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, so we just got to get to grips with the fact that we're talking about these policies that are absolutely fanciful. And even if we did, just remember if everyone in the rich World Went NetZero today,
And stayed that way for the rest of the century. It would reduce temperatures by about half a degree Centigrade or one degree Fahrenheit. So, yes, it would be noticeable, but it wouldn't have fixed most of the problem, that's course because the vast majority of emissions are going to come from China, India, and I forget who are all places that want to get much richer. So again, we have no sense of proportion here, net zeroth, both impossible. And it's probably also a Net Zero by
If something is an incredibly ineffective way to help the world, it's a good idea to say we want to fix climate but I think there's something wrong and saying we want to fix climate to the extent that we're just going to leave off a lot of the money that could have helped save a lot of other stuff. And it's also wrong to tell people. We're going to go down a road that will eventually make every one of you yellow vest protesters because it's just going to be so expensive.
So there's a limited amount of time resources money energy, Focus that can be spent on looking after the world. There are trade-offs between going green, stopping poverty, Health, pollution, women's, education, child, mortality etc, etc at the moment, the most widespread of these, whether it go to public campaigns political campaign.
Anne's government talks Davos conference, has the ability to click that button to offset your carbon when you fly on a plane. The ability to round up and donate money to Greenpeace or whoever it might be all of these different vectors could be pointing pointing at places that were longer leavers ones, that would give you a better multiplier on all of these. Given that we have, what seems to be a culture of altruism, right? That's like one positive white. Pilled way of looking at what's happening. You know, people
It's to make an impact. The problem is that the less sexy risks and the ones that galvanized, the more poorly. What is a way that you foresee of trying to get people to buy into your 12 points? So, I think
there's one thing and we've talked about that in several different ways you need to get people off the ledge. If climate change, is the end of the world, of course, that's the only thing you should worry about, you know.
AOC said, it very beautifully when when when she was talking about there's only 12 years left. It's you know it's been a sort of recurrent phrase at least since 1972. When the UN first told us, we just had 10 years left. But yeah, we only have 12 years left. She said, and you're worried about how we're going to pay for. That makes perfect sense. If the world was really ending, this is the only thing you should be focused on. So, it makes sense. If you believe you're at the, on the, on the
On the edge. And so we need to First pull people back and that's what I've been trying to do. You know, you mentioned the the polar bears, the fact that a lot more people die from cold and heat. I have another graft. I love, which is basically how many people die from climate-related disasters. So we have pretty good data. At least the last hundred years and in the 1920s on average every year people die, from climate-related disasters, or cold, cold, and Heat. And
Drought storms floods and and extreme temperatures about half a million people died each year 100 years ago. Now, most people would certainly when you look at the presentation think that, that had increased since then it's actually dramatically decreased such that in the last decade in the 2010s, it was 18,000 last year. It was 11,000, people globally and mind you. We pour Drupal din sighs. So actually the
Rachel of risk has gone down even more. We have seen a decline of about 98 percent and in total deaths from climate-related disasters, this has nothing to do with climate. This has everything to do with the fact that when you're richer your more technologically advanced, you don't die as much. You're more resilient, we've just simply become much better at dealing with whatever nature throws actor, which is one of the reasons why we should make sure that the rest of the world also gets out of poverty. So they can get the same benefits that we're having.
But the reality here is, Once you pull people back from that ledge, you can then start talking about now. All right, so what do you want to do? Do you want to? Yeah, not drive your car tomorrow, and help a hapless guy and 100 years and then tiny tiny amount, or do you want to do something really, really effective right now. And once you point that out, once you've taken away the end of the world, I think it's a lot easier to get people to start realizing. Oh wait, there's some really, really good stuff here.
But what I'm trying to do with this particular thing, and that's because I've, you know, this is what I've been saying for 20 years and failed. So what I'm trying right now is, is basically to say, look, whatever else is you're doing, I'm simply saying, why don't we spend 35 billion dollars, couch change, spend than all the other stuff that you want. But let's just spend this tiny, tiny, tiny amount, and make the world immensely much better. How about that? And I think, even a lot of people, you know, even the aoc's of the world would also say sure,
I'd love to do that and then go let me go back and worry about climate change and that's fine. That's sort of another way that, you know, I would probably still disagree with her but, you know, fundamentally. I want to get everybody on board with this boat. We made all these promises. We're not actually going to deliver, why don't we? At least do the really smart stuff that's incredibly cheap. First
Why should people go if they want to support these efforts and try and make some sort of an impact
themselves. So there's a number of different ways. First of all, I'm an academic, so I'm not, yeah, we're not looking for money to do this. We're not the right guys to go out and actually fix tuberculosis then it's stop TV or it's a Red Cross or many many of these other organizations. It's also very much about getting your politicians to think about this. It's also just about getting that
Shane going. So I'm really hoping that when people watch this, they'll simply start having these conversations with their, with their kids or their peers or their grandparents, around the tables and say, why are we focused on these things? I'm coming out with a book next month. It's also available on our website but it's yeah, I'm still working on it. We're publishing this e35 papers around the world so you can go to our website. It's called Copenhagen consensus.com / half.
If time, and that's basically because we're at halftime but nowhere near halfway, right? So we're basically saying let's do the SMART stuff. Now, you can also follow me on Twitter and and obviously, I'm hoping to help. Give that sort of input that will make you better at pushing all the other people to become slightly. More aware that. This is how we should be spending our money. Because at the end of the day, this is not going to happen unless also, you know everybody? Yeah, I want, it's not. Yeah, I live in the
Countries greater tunberg. I think she's, you know, I think she's a great girl. I really have a lot of respect for her because she's heard the message loud and clear. The world is ending and it seems like nobody's doing enough. So I understand why she's doing what she's doing, but I would love her to then say why aren't we doing the real stuff first? Right? So if we could take away some of the fear I think a lot of people like Greta tunberg could actually start a saying, I want to do the real stuff and then of course we could actually get our politicians to do.
Do a little little less of the dumb stuff and a little more of the smart stuff
gun. I really appreciate you. I like the fact that you are very measured with the way that you put this stuff across. I think that you need to be delicate when sort of broaching this topic with people because you'll just trigger a response that's going to get them to dig their heels in and ignore what you're saying. I think it's definitely the right demeanor and the right sort of rhetoric to go about this stuff with very much looking forward to the book coming out. And yeah, I really hope that this is opened a lot of people's eyes every time that I
Speak to someone. That's got a measured response when it comes to how we should be dealing with current problems. Facing the world. It does give me a glimmer of hope so congratulations for doing that, dude. I really appreciate you. Thank you for your time today. Thank you, Chris.
Thank you very
much for tuning in. I hope that that has opened your eyes to some of the other ways that we could save both the planet and the people that live on it, in a more evidence-based and science grounded way. I really appreciate the work that Beyond is doing and pushing back against some of the overreach that we are seeing. This, doesn't mean that climate change isn't a problem. It just means that there are other ways that we could perhaps focus our time.
Anyway, thank you very much for listening and I'll see you next time.
